A hospital information system is a comprehensive, integrated information system designed to manage the administrative, financial and clinical aspects of a hospital or other medical installations. These hospital information systems are usually based on a network of server and client machines and help to organize the medical treatment comprising diagnostic tasks such as radiology or other examinations as well as treatment tasks. In order to organize and optimize the operational procedures within a hospital environment, a hospital information system usually provides workflows or taskflows defining a number of tasks and their connections in order to schedule, for example, the treatment of a patient and coordinate the clinical processes. The organization of these worksteps into information technology based taskflow helps to optimize the treatment of a patient and the efficiency in a hospital environment.
During creation of a taskflow a high number of boundary conditions have to be taken into account: the taskflows have to be adjusted to the resources available in each specific hospital environment to avoid resource conflicts and, for example, a possible loss of data during the execution of the taskflow. Furthermore, since in a clinical environment these taskflows relate to the treatment of human individuals, a high level of fail-safety and integrity has to be maintained at all times, because errors in the taskflow may put a patient in harm's way.
To achieve this high level of safety and integrity, these taskflows are therefore usually created by approved personnel chosen by the manufacturer of the hospital information system. This guarantees that the manufacturer of the hospital information system can ensure the quality of each taskflow. If new taskflows are to be integrated into an existing hospital information system, the manufacturer is usually instructed accordingly and these new taskflows are then created by the manufacturer and introduced into the hospital information system with an upgrade at a later time.